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Books Lying Open:
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Answer of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment -- PotM
Archive The term occurred to me when we found ourselves in the car two days in a row, on the way home from running some errands, and each time had goddamned Hungry Like the Wolf running through our heads after hearing it in the store we'd just left. Very different stores, too; fricking Home Depot in the second instance! Fortunately, this affliction, while annoying, can be readily cured by a quick listen to virtually any decent music. I chose Green Day on my WinAmp list the first day, and Marilyn Manson on a tape in the car the second time. -- March 9, 2005 |
Friday March 25, 2005 | |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD
Archives "Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | ||
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For today I've got a couple of news items that were written Tuesday and not posted Wednesday, and another one on the diet formerly known as Atkins that I just wrote right now. Down below is the story of Flux's head trauma part 1, with part 2 right after it, since I was unlucky enough to score a second bleeding head wound at a Kali class on Wednesday night. That one didn't come with a mild concussion, fortunately.
And if you like amusingly- senseless violence being perpetrated upon cute cartoon animals, this Easter cartoon might be to your liking as well. It makes me laugh every year, at least.
To the news: € It looks like the no-carb craze is pretty well over, as entropy and the "eat all the meat and carbs you like and get fatter" diet returns to prevalence in America. I haven't seen an ad for no-carb anything in months, and the silly fad of lettuce wrapped bacon cheeseburgers seems to be pretty much gone. In fact, it's so over that even the Atkins people are giving up on their original no-carb foods, and are trying something different and sure to confuse consumers.
The article goes on to say that 26% of Americans are trying to shed weight, and 4% of those are using a low-carb diet. That's down from 9% in January of 2004. I find those figures interesting, since 4% of 26% is just 1% of all Americans, and hell, 9% of 26% is just over 2%. I thought I saw figures during Atkins' heyday last year that like 10 or 12% of all Americans were trying to follow the no-carb diet plan... if it was just 2%, why did the diet get so much attention? True, 2% of 280,000,000 people is more than 5 million people, but given the constant Atkins diet news items and food commercials, I'm confused. Anyway, as most dieticians predicted, the Atkins' forced ketosis thing did work for quick weight loss if you could stomach the super protein food plan, but hardly anyone could, long term, and hardly anyone took steps to change their lifestyle (I.E. eating healthier and exercising) so hardly anyone kept the weight off. And thus does America turn to the next "sounds too good to be true" weight loss plan that doesn't involve any sort of sacrifice, hunger, or exercise. Hard to imagine why 2/3 of us are fat, eh?
In today's news there's more about the amazing vegetable woman of Clearwater, Florida: € Major media stories are now pointing out what all the blogs were talking about over the weekend (I posted about it on Monday); that Bush signed a law as governor of Texas that allows hospitals to pull the plug on life support for patients who can't pay, even over the objections of the family, so long as the doctors determine that the person is brain dead or has no hope of recovery.
So that's that, then. You win a prize if you can find a more blatant example of hypocrisy in the news this week. I do have to quote a bit from further down the article though, just to once again demonstrate that the job of White House Press Secretary under George Bush is perhaps the worst job on earth, at least if you have anything resembling a conscience or a sense of ethics.
And I always thought Ari Fleischer was special in his bald faced lying. Seems it's just a job requirement.
€ I've got one more (and this is the last one forever, I hope) Terri Schiavo news item; don't worry, it's good news for a change, since it turns out most Americans aren't as stupid as the politicians would have us believe. People are seeing right through this political bullshit, and they don't like it. To take some figures from an ABC News poll:
The bad news is that while only 30% of Americans like that Congress is wasting time on this grandstanding bullshit, and most Americans support the right to die, the groups in the minority on these issues are fanatical about their beliefs and about voting to support them, and they are just about unanimous in their support for Prez'nit Bush and his Christian Right policies. And a crazy 30% that always vote beat out the majority who only vote occasionally, and sometimes support Bush and his ilk for other reasons. |
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 In
Monday's blog I talked about my new intended devotion to Kali training,
especially when it came to stick work. I wanted to improve more quickly
and try harder and all of that, and concluded by saying:
When Tuesday night arrived and it was time to write Wednesday's entry, I thought I would be happy about my stick work, or angry about not doing it well, or perhaps even have nothing to say if we happened to do only open hand. What I did not expect to be was injured... by another student's stick, appropriately enough.
It was sad too; we were doing some sparring at very close range, the other guy was leading, and as he was swinging very quickly to one side and then the other, while I dodged back and forth countering him. The problem came when he brought his stick up overhead to go from one strike to the next, but he was tired and going too fast and brought it up too low and it got me sideways, across the bridge of the nose, with the butt end held in his fist. What makes it sad is that it wasn't even an intentional. We do butt end strikes all the time, but we pull them up short, and he wasn't even trying to do one when he hit me full speed. He was just lifting the stick up to swing it over, and when he went a bit low and I leaned in a bit too much... wham. It's fun to have an interesting Kali story to tell in class, but getting injured this way is sort of like being run over by a hit man while he's backing out of his garage on his way to kill someone else. I wasn't knocked unconscious, but when it hit me the blow was solid enough to jolt my head to the side, and (as onlookers told me after the fact) we both froze and they knew someone had been hit, but didn't know who until my legs unhinged and I sprawled into an awkward seated position. It was only then that they realized how hard a hit it had been, and closed in to see the damage. I was bleeding a bit, and my first instinct was to get up and check it in the mirror, but when I got to my feet I started listing sideways and Gura and others led me to a chair. I would have fallen if they hadn't, I think. A towel was pressed to the cut and I held them there until the bleeding stopped, while the room wobbled up and down and spun slightly. Or so it seemed to me. Fortunately the bleeding stopped soon enough, since it was a dent, not a cut. The only reason it bled was that the rough wooden end of his stick scraped me a bit, and the skin split from the sheer force of the impact. I'd have gotten a substantial bruise if it had been to the shoulder or arm or something like that, but since it was right to the cartilage of the nose there was no meat to absorb the blow. They say that bells go off or you see stars when you get hit really hard in the head, and while I didn't hear or see either of those things, I clearly remember a very loud sound when it hit me. Other people said they didn't hear anything, but in my head it was a boom, like a coconut being dropped from several stories up. And it was loud, I mean like ear-hurting loud. I also now see what it's like for boxers when they are out on their feet: if you remember the famous Mike Tyson loss to Buster Douglas, Mike got nailed, went down and lost his mouthpiece, and rather than just getting back up to keep fighting, he started groping around with his boxing glove to try and pick up his mouthpiece. It seemed insane to the home viewer; why is he wasting time with that when he should get up and beat the count, and then have the ref or someone hand him the mouthpiece. What did I do after being hit? I got up, after a few seconds, and started towards the bathroom (five meter walk) to wash off the blood and inspect the damage. I was carrying my stick, and my idea was to put it on a table on the way to the bathroom. When the Gura and others intercepted me on my way there and told me to sit down, I was agreeable to that, but I wanted to put my stick on the table and then turn back to the chair. I was unable to communicate that though, so we had a brief tug of war with me trying to go that way, stretching my stick out, while they pulled me back towards the seat. They won when I gave up and let them seat me, and once sitting I dropped my stick on the ground and completely forgot about it for maybe ten minutes. To an onlooker on TV, my actions would have seemed as strange as Iron Mike's when he was fumbling around for his mouthpiece. It didn't matter if my stick went on the table or not; it's just a baked and lacquered length of bamboo, I smack other sticks with it dozens of times per class, I hit the ground with it all the time, etc. But in my mind at that moment, I simply had to set it down on the table before I did anything else. It was all I could think about, just like the dazed Mike Tyson and his mouthpiece. Once seated, I pressed the wad of tissue to my head and waited for the bleeding to stop and the room to stop swaying. The room came to rest first, and fortunately the wound stopped shortly after that, and though any sort of spinning or fast movement was out of the question for the remainder of the night, class was almost over when I got whacked and I made it through the talk and Flux's-injury-as-object-lesson-on-proper-leading-technique lecture okay. I was also glad to see that the night was cold and a bit drizzly, since after I stood outside talking to a classmate/friend for 10 minutes, my head was definitely clear enough for the drive home. I had to do it alone since Malaya hadn't come to class with me that night. Once home she made dinner while I showered, and then we basically sat on the couch for a few hours and vegged out with TV and food while I kept an ice pack against the swollen third eye region of my head. I had a sort of headache, but nothing throbbing. The bad part was that my wits were addled, as they say. I could walk and talk and cook and such, but I couldn't think very well, and I couldn't multi-task at all. It felt like I was slightly drunk, or sick, and I kept getting that, "What am I doing here again?" feeling every time I walked into another room. Conversation was possible, but I was dumb. I kept fumbling for words, couldn't remember names, couldn't make quick adlibs, and when I tried to write after Malaya went to bed, I couldn't do it. I could type and make words appear and such, but I could not make any sense of complicated topics, and I certainly couldn't write a book review of a tricky novel, which is what I had planned to include for the lower portion of Wednesday's blog. I had also planned on finishing the editing on the current chapter of my novel after I blogged, but without the ability to make sense of a book review, I wasn't about to try to go over 20 pages of my own fantasy. So I surfed mindlessly, read the first half of Deaver's The Stone Monkey, and wished I were tired enough to go to bed early. Unfortunately I wasn't, and since I can't force myself to sleep if I'm not tired, I stayed up far later than I wanted to, bored. Being awake wasn't much fun either, since the top of my nose was swollen enough that I had to breathe through my mouth, the tip of my nose felt numb enough that I kept poking at it to be sure it was still there, and I was hungry, but had no appetite. I felt pretty damn groggy Wednesday as well, but by late that night I was feeling normal enough to finish editing the chapter I was working on. Thursday I felt fine, albeit with a sort forehead. Sore in two places, due to Wednesday's Kali, which I'll detail in a moment. First though, as for my "improve my stick or get knocked out trying" resolution... it was inconclusive. We did stick stuff all night Tuesday and while I didn't suck and I didn't slack off, I wasn't especially brilliant at anything we were doing either. Part of it was my partner, who was pretty new and therefore needed a lot more reps than me, and needed my help in getting things right. Teaching is fine, and it's better to perfect something I already know a little bit, but having a more advanced partner is a great teaching aid since they force me to work harder to keep up and inspire me to do it better. And yes, in theory that was my job in the pairing, since he was the new guy, and I should have been doing it perfectly to inspire and pressure him to keep up. We always say that you've got to get sick of being hit to do better though, and I certainly got hit. Perhaps it's a sign?
Hit Flux in the head week continued Wednesday, with our once a month workshop held at Master Tuhan's house. This time the class was going to cover cane and backhand knife, and everyone had canes with them, most of them recently purchased from Cost Plus World Market. Seven bucks, and light enough for flicking but sturdy enough not to break right away. I won't bore you with endless non-illustrated talk about what we learned, but the class was okay, while the chance to watch the other Gurus and expert students spar was awesome. It's fun sometimes to tell myself that I'm doing really well at some technique, and that I don't have too much further to push it. And then I get to watch some guys with 10 or 15 or 20 years experience in Kali do it, and I feel like a rentacop with some pepper spray watching the SWAT team storm a fortified compound. There's just no comparison, as they do everything I can do 5x faster and 10x more accurately, and then add 5x more variations and other details that I couldn't even have imagined. It's like watching a really good fight scene from an action movie, except that everything is much faster, more accurate, more deadly, and it's real. The real fun of the night began near the end of class, after we'd been working with several backhand knife techniques for an hour or more. I was taking my turn being the dummy with another guy striking me; a guy who is regularly in my Tues/Thurs classes, oddly enough (there were like 19 guys there, only two of them guys I had ever worked with, so long odds). The move was for me to stab at him, to which he would counter by cutting my wrist on the way in, then cutting my throat across the front, then reaching around the side to cut it from the other side. He'd done the sequence a dozen times or so, but on the last try, for reasons unknown, he was a bit off when he reached across my body, and smacked his wooden pretend knife into my right eyebrow. It wasn't a very hard hit, far less of a thunk than the one Tuesday night, but he hit right on the arch of the eye bone and made enough of a dent that blood began to flow pretty freely. I was annoyed; I wouldn't even have taken a turn off of the sparring if not for the blood, but I didn't want to bleed all over myself, and I'm sure other people didn't want to get splattered with my blood, so I had to take a time out and go get it stopped. The funny part was when I went into the house and got a paper towel from Tuhan's wife. I held it with my right hand, but my left was covered in blood and I couldn't turn on the sink without getting the handles all messy. Fortunately, their two girls, ages 6 and 4 or so, came running into the kitchen to see what had happened and they were simply thrilled to see my injury. With the enthusiasm only precocious children can muster, they burst forth with a chorus of questions. "What
happened?" And so on. They did turn on the sink for me though, and though the bleeding didn't stop entirely, it slowed to a trickle that a Band-Aid was sufficient to staunch. Plus the gory-looking Band-Aid got me plenty of sympathy points from everyone else there. The whole thing put me into rather a foul mood though, and when I had no appetite and didn't want to talk to anyone afterwards, Malaya was happy to leave early so we could come home and eat. I told her to stay and hang out and talk some; I just had a headache and didn't want to be in the noisy patio, but no, she wanted to go.
This picture isn't terribly impressive either, but you can see Tuesday's wound healing, along with the new hole to the right (as seen in the mirror). I should have taken some more photos later, since several hours after this shot the whole right side of my eyebrow swelled up and turned a lovely purple. Bruising that had almost completely faded by Thursday night's regular Kali class, during which we played with my favorite thing of all, double stick. Nothing else to report from there though; class was fun, the two hours flew by, and no one, not even me, got smacked in the face. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
here
was no blog Wednesday, if you were wondering how you missed it. Short
story: I got whacked in the head at Tuesday night's Kali class and was
too out of it all night to write anything coherent. Long story: see
below.
